LEGAL AID OF NORTH CAROLINA INC
We provide equal access to justice
Programs and results
What we aim to solve
Almost a quarter of North Carolina’s population struggles to make ends meet. Families all over the state face hardships like: inadequate housing, food insecurity, lack of access to benefits and healthcare, domestic violence, unfair employment, discriminatory treatment, instability after a natural disaster, and other obstacles. Legal Services Corporation found in 2022 that 74 percent of low-income families experienced at least one civil legal problem in the past year, including consumer issues, housing conditions, health care, domestic violence, and income maintenance. They also found that households that have dealt with issues related to eviction and/or domestic violence were disproportionately more likely to have experienced multiple civil legal problems in the previous year. To make matters worse, many Americans may incorrectly believe that they have a right to an attorney in any court case. In fact, assistance in a civil case is frequently difficult and expensive to obtain.
Our programs
What are the organization's current programs, how do they measure success, and who do the programs serve?
Right to Education Project (REP)
The Right to Education Project (REP) is a statewide project that focuses on serving children in the public education system. REP cases involve: short-term suspension; long-term suspension; expulsion; involuntary transfers to alternative school; denial of enrollment; discrimination on the basis of race, national origin, sex or disability; mistreatment by school security personnel; special education; bullying; and academic failure.
In addition to providing direct legal services to clients, REP provides community education in the form of publications, presentations, trainings, and media outreach, and collaborates with other organizations and individuals working for education justice.
To be eligible for services from REP, a child must live in a household with an income not more than 187 percent of the federal poverty level, or live in foster care. Legal Aid of North Carolina screens all applicants to determine if they meet financial and other requirements for service.
Domestic Violence & Sexual Assault Project
The Domestic Violence & Sexual Assault Project (DVSAP) is a statewide project that provides legal assistance to victims of domestic violence, sexual assault, dating violence, and stalking. DVSAP advocates are trained to keep victims safe and empower them to become self-sufficient so they can live independently from their abusers.
DVSAP advocates work closely with community-based programs, agencies, and task forces serving victims of domestic and sexual violence. The DVSAP has existing formal collaborative agreements and referral protocols with more than 75 local organizations.
DVSAP receives funding from the NC Governors Crime Commission, NC Council for Women and Youth Involvement, and the State of North Carolina.
The DVSAP also works closely with Immigration Pathways for Victims, which provides comprehensive and culturally appropriate legal services to immigrant survivors of violence needing assistance with immigration.
The Fair Housing Project
The Fair Housing Project works to eliminate housing discrimination and to ensure equal housing opportunity for all people in North Carolina.
• Providing education and outreach to residents, advocates, and service providers throughout North Carolina
• Offering legal representation to individuals who have been discriminated against
• Conducting research into fair housing
• Conducting fair housing testing to determine possible discrimination based on race, disability, familial status, and other grounds
The Fair Housing Project provides services to members of all protected classes, with special emphasis upon underserved areas and populations including immigrants; residents who are non-English speaking or have limited English proficiency; rural residents; persons with disabilities; homeless individuals; and persons residing in areas with large concentrations of people of color. Visit us at FairHousingNC.org.
Farmworker Unit
The Farmworker Unit (FWU) is a statewide project that serves migrant farmworkers. Although farmworkers do very hard work and although without their labor we would not have the abundant food we do, they often struggle just to earn enough to feed and clothe their families. North Carolina has the 5th or 6th largest population of farmworkers in the United States and the largest number of farmworkers who come to the United States on temporary visas to do farmwork.
FWU seeks to increase the level of socioeconomic integration of migrant farm workers to ensure full participation in society. We work toward this goal by protecting and enforcing the employment and civil rights of migrant workers and by protecting and enforcing the contractual and statutory obligations under H2-A worker contracts and other legal rights of H-2A workers. Our hope is to ensure that migrant workers are afforded equal opportunity to live and work safely, and in accordance with federal, state and international law.
Economic Justice Initiative
The Economic Justice Initiatve (EJI) strives to keep working poor and working families in possession of their homes and home equity.
By providing high-quality legal representation in foreclosure actions, the EJI saves homes, preserves credit ratings and strives to make prohibitive the cost of conducting business for unscrupulous brokers and lenders. The EJI also provides community education to increase awareness of home-finance best practices and the dangers of predatory lending.
The EJI collaborates with six other legal services organizations to form the Home Defense Project (HDP). The HDP saves homes and reduces foreclosures in North Carolina by securing loan modifications for borrowers and providing high-quality foreclosure-defense work in every county in the state. The HDP is funded in part by the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation.
The Senior Law Project
The Senior Law Project provides free civil legal help to North Carolinians who are 60 years of age or older. Priority is given to those with the greatest need.
The Senior Law Project helps with wills, powers of attorney, public benefits (Medicaid, food stamps, Supplemental Security Income Program, Social Security Disability Insurance, etc.), abuse and neglect, unemployment compensation, housing (foreclosure, eviction, subsidized housing, repairs, utilities, etc.), consumer issues and wrongful repossession.
The Senior Law Project operates our Senior Legal Helpline, a toll-free hotline available for seniors across the state.
Veterans Law Project
The Veterans Law Project is a special, statewide unit that helps low-income veterans overcome service-related legal barriers that prevent them from living self-sufficiently and seeking economic opportunity.
We focus our advocacy on cases that can have a serious impact on a veteran's ability to find work, secure housing, and establish economic stability. Areas of practice include disability compensation, discharge upgrades, pension benefits, and Veterans Administration overpayments.
Veterans must be at or below 200 percent of the federal poverty guidelines to be eligible for help. We prioritize clients who are homeless or facing homelessness. Facing homelessness can mean couch-surfing, being behind on rent and threatened with eviction, being behind on mortgage payments and facing foreclosure, and more.
Disaster Relief Project
The Disaster Relief Project provides legal assistance and education to survivors of natural disasters in North Carolina and supports community economic development and equitable long-term recovery and resiliency in disaster-impacted communities.
The Disaster Relief Project’s services include:
• Providing disaster survivors with information about their rights
• Advocating for clients when they are applying for recovery fund assistance and appealing decisions
• Standing up for disaster survivors who were victimized by fraudulent contractors or bad-actor landlords
• Connecting clients to community resources
• Clarifying title and property ownership, including providing wills and advanced directives for those who have been affected by a natural disaster
• Supporting local long-term disaster recovery organizations by writing bylaws, providing document templates, and helping groups incorporate as 501(c)(3) nonprofits
• Hosting disaster recovery education sessions and legal clinic
Medicaid Appeals Technical Team
The Medicaid Appeals Technical Team (MATT) serves the legal needs of the 1.7 million Medicaid beneficiaries in North Carolina who have been enrolled into Prepaid Health Plans during the State’s transition from a fee-for-service model of healthcare delivery to a capitated managed care model.
MATT’s inaugural work during 2021-2022 was funded by grants from the Kate B. Reynolds Charitable Trust. MATT works collaboratively with our legal and community partners in North Carolina and nationally to achieve our goals:
• Enforcing Medicaid beneficiaries’ rights
• Monitoring systemic issues to insure that the interests of beneficiaries are centered in the State’s transition to managed care
• Educating community partners about beneficiary rights
• Bringing a health justice and equity lens to our legal advocacy, especially to address systemic barriers created by structural racism and other forms of oppression
Medical-Legal Partnership
Legal Aid of North Carolina’s Medical-Legal Partnership (MLP) project brings together physicians, nurses, social workers, attorneys and paralegals to address social and environmental determinants of poor health that may have a legal remedy, including: substandard housing conditions; domestic violence; food, income, and housing insecurity; improper denials of Medicaid and disability benefits; and failure to provide children with the special educational services to which they are entitled.
Our Medical-Legal Partnership project is expanding across the state. Here is a partial list of our current partnerships:
Statewide
• North Carolina Cancer Hospital
• North Carolina Community Health Center Association
• UNC Children’s, Transitions Care Clinic
Regional
• FirstHealth of the Carolinas
Charlotte
• Atrium Health
Where we work
External reviews

Videos
Our results
How does this organization measure their results? It's a hard question but an important one.
Evaluation documents
Download evaluation reportsNumber of clients assisted with legal needs
This metric is no longer tracked.Totals By Year
Population(s) Served
Economically disadvantaged people
Type of Metric
Output - describing our activities and reach
Direction of Success
Holding steady
Context Notes
The number recorded here is the number of clients we served in each year.
Number of lives touched
This metric is no longer tracked.Totals By Year
Population(s) Served
Economically disadvantaged people
Type of Metric
Outcome - describing the effects on people or issues
Direction of Success
Holding steady
Context Notes
This is the total number of people impacted by Legal Aid of North Carolina calculated by taking the total number of people in households served.
Goals & Strategy
Learn about the organization's key goals, strategies, capabilities, and progress.
Charting impact
Four powerful questions that require reflection about what really matters - results.
What is the organization aiming to accomplish?
A legal advocate can be life-changing for a family. Legal Aid ameliorates the devastating effects of poverty by working strategically with other organizations to educate people about their rights, offer free legal advice, and represent clients in legal disputes. Legal intervention can change a household’s circumstances from unsafe housing that causes medical problems to custody agreements that ensure survivors of domestic violence can protect their family from future abuse. Research shows that the availability of legal services decreases the likelihood that women will be battered. According to the Legal Services Corporation, survivors rate the filing of a protective order as one of the two most effective tools for stopping domestic violence, second only to leaving the abuser. Yet fewer than one in five low-income victims of domestic violence ever gets to see a lawyer.
Legal Aid of North Carolina's goal is to create a more just and prosperous North Carolina by ensuring equal access to justice for everyone. We focus on legal needs that rob individuals of their dignity and their access to basic needs like housing, food, employment, health, safety, and an education.
The need is so great that we prioritize cases that have the biggest impact on client's lives and their communities. One study found that the average percentage of cases in which both sides were represented by counsel was only 24 percent. This terrible imbalance in the justice system can spark a chain reaction of negative consequences for people already struggling to make ends meet.
We use a combination of staff attorneys, volunteers, and partners to serve as many people as we can. We have eighteen regional offices throughout the state, a free centralized helpline, and special projects that ensure that no group or community is left behind. Special Projects help marginalized groups like children, domestic violence victims, battered immigrants, veterans, seniors, victims of housing discrimination, migrant farmworkers, Native Americans, and other groups. Each year we revisit our priorities to ensure that we are addressing the most dire civil legal needs in North Carolina.
What are the organization's key strategies for making this happen?
Our strategies include providing civil legal help through generalist legal staff, issue-focused expert legal staff, and volunteers. Clients receive three types of services: informational services such as self-help clinics and educational materials, brief service and advice like a conversation with an attorney, and extended service such as representation in court.
In order to make the biggest impact for individual clients and their communities, we take a holistic approach when evaluating clients and potential cases. Legal Aid is committed to improving our clients’ circumstances and helping them to break free from cycles of poverty. Our work improves the quality of life in communities facing hardship and can be instrumental in increasing health and stability. For example, Legal Aid positively impacts clients’ social determinants of health including: increasing the availability of resources to meet daily basic needs, ensuring healthy physical environments, creating equal access to the opportunity to learn and work, and reducing exposure to violence.
We do this by leading the North Carolina Navigator Consortium which helps consumers enroll in healthcare coverage on Healthcare.gov. Thanks in part to the efforts of the NC Navigator Consortium, the only statewide Healthcare.gov navigator group in North Carolina, our state has had the fourth-highest number of enrollments out of the roughly 40 federally facilitated Marketplace states.
Our healthcare work also includes a Medical-Legal Partnership that connects legal and medical professionals to tackle the legal factors that prevent patients from becoming healthy. The partnership includes 10 healthcare providers, including statewide health systems and local health centers. In conjunction with Medicaid expansion and privatization in North Carolina, we have begun outlining future partnerships with insurance companies to provide legal services for Medicaid patients. We know that by strategically tackling a lack of access to affordable healthcare proactively, we can prevent future legal problems that result from poor health and catastrophic poverty.
Our commitment to our clients’ well-being includes providing access to social workers at key offices. Social workers provide additional resources for clients and continue to strengthen Legal Aid’s relationships with local organizations. A recent goal is to expand our clients’ access to social workers across our practice. Since low-income individuals face many obstacles, at Legal Aid we want to ensure that we're doing our best to set our clients up for future success and stability.
What are the organization's capabilities for doing this?
Legal Aid of North Carolina’s has a strong capability to improve the lives of the disenfranchised and those struggling to make ends meet in North Carolina. We touch the lives of more than 110,000 people and handle more than 20,000 legal cases a year. We are deeply embedded in the North Carolina nonprofit community. Not only do we obtain funding for all our programming, we also assist partnering organizations with obtaining and administering grants.
The biggest obstacle preventing equal access to justice for every North Carolinian is a lack of resources. Until the lack of resources can be addressed, Legal Aid employs multiple ways of ensuring that every penny is stretched and that cases are prioritized to help those with the greatest need. Every year we bring on new partners and new funders to increase the impact we can have on our state. Partnerships are built and maintained with city governments, universities, insurance companies, corporations, legal associations, government agencies, local nonprofits, and others.
Internally, we have bolstered our capability by centralizing certain functions. Our centralized free legal helpline is considered one of the best in the country and has been a model for other legal aid organizations. Our helpline quickly and compassionately fields calls and assigns cases to our different programs. Our unique structure that combines regional offices and special projects ensures that no part of the state and no group is left behind in the pursuit of justice.
What have they accomplished so far and what's next?
Over our organization’s past decade (2013-22) we touched the lives of more than 1,157,000 people and provided at least $184.9 million dollars in benefits to our clients. We’ve built ground-breaking partnerships like city-wide eviction diversion projects and a statewide Medical Legal Partnership. We’ve taken on a leadership role in our state as the leader of the NC Navigator consortium that provides access to affordable healthcare. We’ve won cases that have had resulted in more just and equitable housing and educational policies. These shifts in policies have affected millions of children and tenants in North Carolina. We’re a highly regarded Legal Aid and our innovative helpline serves as a model for other civil legal aid organizations.
Our future plans include continuing to grow to serve the increasing civil legal needs of low-income North Carolinians. We plan to grow strategically by expanding partnerships, utilizing technology, centralizing and specializing when necessary, and remaining flexible enough to address new problems. For example, when the coronavirus pandemic struck, low-income residents' ability to continue paying for housing led to an eviction crisis. We obtained emergency funding and used it to hire more attorneys and paralegals, and we created a new Housing Helpline to enhance our intake capacity to better serve our clients and the community. We remain a nimble organization, despite our size, in order to respond to changes in our communities.
How we listen
Seeking feedback from people served makes programs more responsive and effective. Here’s how this organization is listening.
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How is your organization using feedback from the people you serve?
To identify and remedy poor client service experiences, To identify bright spots and enhance positive service experiences, To make fundamental changes to our programs and/or operations, To inform the development of new programs/projects, To identify where we are less inclusive or equitable across demographic groups, To strengthen relationships with the people we serve
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Which of the following feedback practices does your organization routinely carry out?
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What challenges does the organization face when collecting feedback?
Financials
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Operations
The people, governance practices, and partners that make the organization tick.
Connect with nonprofit leaders
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- Analyze a variety of pre-calculated financial metrics
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Connect with nonprofit leaders
SubscribeBuild relationships with key people who manage and lead nonprofit organizations with GuideStar Pro. Try a low commitment monthly plan today.
- Analyze a variety of pre-calculated financial metrics
- Access beautifully interactive analysis and comparison tools
- Compare nonprofit financials to similar organizations
Want to see how you can enhance your nonprofit research and unlock more insights? Learn More about GuideStar Pro.
LEGAL AID OF NORTH CAROLINA INC
Board of directorsas of 07/26/2023
Mr. Gonzalo Frias
Wells Fargo
Term: 2020 - 2023
Reid Cal Adams, Jr.
Womble Bond Dickinson
Gonzalo E. Frias
Duke Energy Corporation
E. D. Gaskins, Jr.
Everett Gaskins Hancock LLP
Lenneka H. Feliciano
Pinto Coates Kyre & Bowers
Diane Wardlow
Client Rep
John Moschandreas
Truist
James M Talley, Jr.
Offit Kurman
Janet Ward Black
Ward Black Law
Jon Heyl
Fox Rothschild
Kyna Hardy
Client Rep
Glenn Barfield
Haithcock, Barfield, Hulse & King
Manisha P. Patel
Law Office of Manisha P. Patel
Linda McGee
Retired Chief Judge of NC Court of Appeals
Alice Freeman
Client Rep
Kristy Fleming
Client Rep
Lee Cory
Troutman Pepper
Timothy Hughes
Bank of America
LaTrice Robinson
Client Rep
Tadra Martin
Secretary, Disability Rights of NC
John R Wester
Robinson Bradshaw
Jeff Kelly
Nelson Mullins
Adrienne Kennedy
Client Rep
Khristen Sellers
Client Rep
Board leadership practices
GuideStar worked with BoardSource, the national leader in nonprofit board leadership and governance, to create this section.
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Board orientation and education
Does the board conduct a formal orientation for new board members and require all board members to sign a written agreement regarding their roles, responsibilities, and expectations? Yes -
CEO oversight
Has the board conducted a formal, written assessment of the chief executive within the past year ? Yes -
Ethics and transparency
Have the board and senior staff reviewed the conflict-of-interest policy and completed and signed disclosure statements in the past year? Yes -
Board composition
Does the board ensure an inclusive board member recruitment process that results in diversity of thought and leadership? Yes -
Board performance
Has the board conducted a formal, written self-assessment of its performance within the past three years? No
Organizational demographics
Who works and leads organizations that serve our diverse communities? Candid partnered with CHANGE Philanthropy on this demographic section.
Leadership
The organization's leader identifies as:
Race & ethnicity
Gender identity
Sexual orientation
No data
Disability
No data